Bitcoin-rs is a Rust-built Bitcoin full node designed to preserve consensus while enabling bold architectural experimentation. It argues that modern AI-driven development and Rust-native integration allow smaller teams to iterate faster and safely reexamine long-standing implementation choices without changing consensus rules. The project centralizes the authoritative UTXO set inside the node (eliminating duplicate Electrum-style ingestion), enforces strong modularity so extensions cannot destabilize validation, and exposes typed, in-process extension points for Rust applications instead of relying on RPC or separate processes. Performance is a first-class requirement: synchronization, storage, memory ownership, concurrency, caching, I/O, and indexing are all redesigned and measured against matched whole-node benchmarks rather than claimed by language change alone.
The implementation specifics include a native Rust script interpreter that verifies Legacy, SegWit v0, and Taproot spends with parallel execution across rayon workers and sighash midstate reuse; an optional kernel feature routes verification through libbitcoinkernel as an independent oracle. Storage is pluggable with an LSM-tree fjall default, redb compiled in and rocksdb optional. A 256-shard in-memory UTXO cache supports checkpointed crash recovery; integrated ScriptIndex serves Esplora-compatible APIs; mempool events publish over ZMQ; getblocktemplate supports mining. Core-compatible JSON-RPC is provided (walletless) alongside a typed async Node embedding API. Quickstart build and run commands are included, and benchmark results are curated with caveats rather than presented as definitive performance claims.
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